The greater Lafayette area consists of two towns: Lafayette is a mixed community with some manufacturing and service as its economic base and West Lafayette, a smaller community, but a central location of Purdue University. Lafayette’s population as of 2020 was about 70, 000 and West Lafayette’s 44, 000. The metropolitan area, including several neighboring towns has a population of about 237,000, a growth of 16 percent since 2010. By far the major “industry” in the area, Purdue University, employs 17,000 workers of all kinds and the Purdue Research Park employs some 3,000 who work for 155 companies.
Although Purdue University always had strong programs and a research agenda involving engineering and agriculture, over the last thirty years the liberal arts, social sciences and humanities grew as well. Purdue employed poets and novelists of national reputation, as well as historians, political scientists and philosophers. Interdisciplinary studies programs were established in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, American Studies, and smaller programs for example concerning Human Rights, Peace Studies, Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies and others. The intellectual vitality of the university and the surrounding communities parallels such growth in many places around the country.
However, pressures from conservatives, advocates for “free enterprise,” and opponents of the flowering of higher education in all its diversity as a result of “the 60s,” grew as well. The politics of Indiana moved to the right with the electoral victories of Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, due to the weakening of the Democratic Party and the sustained assault on organized labor. Indiana moved from a “purple” to a deep “red” state.
And thus, the pressures on higher education in keeping with the new rightwing agenda, which began before the prominence of Donald Trump, expanded. Nancy MacLean, in “Democracy in Chains,” documents the steady penetration of education, K through university, by the Koch Foundation and other conservative forces. Their programs have been recently illustrated in the document Project 2025 which recommends policies that will reverse the vitality and diversity of higher education. This historic project of dismantlement of education was accelerated by the long-term defunding of higher education by states and the national government and the covid epidemic.
These changes involved universities, like Purdue, increasingly currying financial connections with huge corporations and the military, downsizing and marginalizing the university work force, privatizing heretofore public services including food, residences, software services, transforming a public university into a series of private corporations. And these changes in the political economy of higher education have been paralleled by pressures to transform the curricula from rigorous discussion to celebration of American exceptionalism. And the transformation of higher education in the Greater Lafayette area has paralleled the transformations of the political economy of the twin cities, increasing privatization of public services, enticing outside corporate investors, increasing ties to the military and transforming communities and residences.as well.
Now, West Lafayette, in conjunction with the Purdue Research Foundation (which has been deemed “private”) is embarking on the construction of a huge South Korean chip manufacturing and packaging plant in West Lafayette. The West Lafayette City Council is scheduled on May 5 to debate changing ordinances to allow this massive factory to be housed in a residential community in the north end of West Lafayette. (The City Council has the last word even though the Area Planning Commission voted against the rezoning request.)
Indiana politicians and spokespersons have been fantasizing for many years about Central Indiana becoming “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” Now the pending agreement with the firm, SK hynix, it is claimed, will make Indiana a huge player in the new US/global political economy. However, those familiar with such dreams recall that SK hynix closed a large plant in another college town in Eugene, Oregon because product demand had declined. And those familiar with Wisconsin, are reminded of huge tax incentives given by the US government and the state to another high-tech company, Foxconn. In both cases, large numbers of new jobs were promised and, in both cases, smaller communities suffered critical residential dislocations. The jobs did not materialize. In the Oregon case the plant shut down. In Wisconsin the facility built turned out to be a fraction of the size of what was promised.
Critics of the rezoning request that the West Lafayette City Council is being asked to grant make the following points.
The zoning request is for Sy Hynix to use 121 acres of land which is surrounded by residential communities. The plant to be constructed would be for packaging superchips, including manufacturing processes, and to develop a research and development center. The manufacturing of semiconductors is known to risk fire, explosions, and health risks to adjacent communities and workers. And the state of Indiana has already issued orders to reduce “regulatory safeguards.” Since semiconductor manufacturing causes health and safety hazards, experts urge that factories be placed far from residential areas. In this case, SK hynix will be adjacent to and surrounded by existing residential communities and near a school, a wellness center, and a park, as well as large areas of greenery to the north.
Along with the dangers of air pollution, the projected plant will increase traffic in a heretofore residential area, put demands on the county’s water supply, and in the main radically transform a residential, and rural environment to an industrial zone that may destroy the sense of community which residents have enjoyed.
In sum, for the last decade the Greater Lafayette community and its primary “industry,” Purdue University, have embraced a single-minded economic development model that pays little attention to the quality of life of the community, health and safety inside and outside facilities, while transforming the tradition of open and vibrant education at Purdue University to the celebration of a model of unbridled growth at all costs.
If the West Lafayette City Council approves the business/university push for moving closer to a midwest “Silicon Valley,” it will substantially reduce the quality of life as well as the educational vitality of this community.
By Harry Targ